I signed up for a membership at a local Golds Gym when they were in the pre-opening phase. Pre-paid the original month, was told to use the contract as the membership card for that period, and I would get the membership card soon after they opened. Week 1, the computer isn't in yet. Week 2, the computer isn't in yet. Week 3, the computer just came in the end of last week, but we didnt have time to get to your card, yet. Week 4, the computer just came in the end of the week before last week, but we still didn't have time to get to your card, yet. The CA hired by the original owner of this franchise, refuses to provide validation ("we've closed the file, we don't have to talk to the client, but we can keep it reporting on your file as long as we hold the file.") and has gone as far as trying to say that Golds Gym doesn't even give out membership cards (that was news to the corporate headquarters franchising office) I contacted the new owners of the franchise (Golds Gyms corporate policy is that the current owners is liable for the franchise no matter who was the owner at the time; and since the entry is listed in the companies/franchise name the current owner is ultimately responsible for reports in the companies/franchises name), they are being told by the CA that they removed the entry from Experian, but they haven't. Experian was asked to validate it twice, but they say that they will not revalidate an entry for the same reason once the CA answers that reason to the affirmative. I sent a letter to both the OC and CA demanding that the OC send me and Experian the letter demanding that the CAs entry in the OCs name be deleted, and haven't received a response. I have been fighting this since last July, when I had to challenge them twice on the TransUnion report. First verified, second unverified (the first person I gave my dispute to accidentially entered it as Not Mine, instead of failure to deliver membership card). Unfortunately, the only real violations are that the CA did not update the comments to >ACCOUNT INFO DISPUTED BY CONSUMER< since they stopped reporting (even though they've re-validated the account since the requests.
Hopefully the new, new owner of the franchise will be able to resolve this issue shortly, but does anyone know how they can be forced to accept dispute requests, more than once. It seems to be a FCRA violation that Experians corporate policy is that "we'll just assume that if they answered affirmative once to this issue, we won't dispute it any more."
I think you need to write to your state/local consumer affairs people, gyms have such a bad reputation you'll probably get a better response from them than credit-oriented people. It sounds like you tried to get out of your contract because of service issues.
Well, the new, new owner, apparently ownership has just changed, again, is working to get this matter resolved, so hopefully when their new store opens up, he'll have gotten a reply back from the CA, and this will be resolved, if not he can write the we've been trying to get the company to cease collections, they refuse, we want our listing deleted letter. Apparently even the new owner had also gotten a rude response from the CA when he contacted them... So, hopefully within about a month this will be resolved, when their new store opens. I'm just wondering now, if in the future there is anyway to force Experian to accept a valid dispute more than once if the dispute is not resolved. It seems like their policy of "we'll only challenge an account one time for any type of challenge" is directly opposite of the FCRAs any non-frivelous dispute must be accepted rules. Saying that anything that has been disputed once, no matter how valid the consumer believes that dispute to be, is frivelous; seems to be a flagrant abuse of the CRAs discretion to determine what is frivelous.
I agree Experian is openly violating the FCRA. In contrast I have had good results with TU, apparently they've gotten beat up enough by the legal system that they play nice.
TransUnion was the easiest that I had to go through to remove this account. When the CA tried to reply with only the basic information, without cerifying that their client provided the membership card, it was gone. Experian is allowing them to reply with only validation sufficient to answer a NOT MINE dispute, no matter what the dispute is. Thats why I am hoping that eventually I'll get the letter from the OC to remove it...
They have taken all my negative items off my report. I dispute them on-line every six months and after two years they went away. I challenged the dates this time and the items were removed. Each time I disputed the items they would remove only one this time I had four items removed.
So you were asking them to delete derogs based on the wrong date? Every time I try to dispute a derog on my dh (his last one) they just say they already investigated it.
That's the same response that I get, they won't even allow me to say more than I want to dispute XXX account anymore, before saying that they're denying the dispute for already investigated and validated...
I was able to get EXP to start a new "investigation" on an item they refused to reinvestigate on line with a well written snail-mail letter pointing out missing data in the original tradeline and basically saying "this is too vague, what did you really investigate". I'm in the position where most of my baddies will fall off naturally next year anyway so I can't get too enthusiastic about fighting EXP over this stuff. OC validation not going too well either, my first two CRRRs to OCs went ignored.
